Summer J. Hart

biography

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Summer is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), winner of the 2024 Nassar Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellow at MacDowell. Her writing can be found in Best Small Fictions 2023, Bedfellows, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in shows and galleries across the country. Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

e: summerjhart@gmail.com

ig: @summerjhart

listuguj mi’gmaq first nation

land acknowledgement

My studio was built on the land of the Munsee Lenape—the Wolf Clan, one of three main groups within the Lenape Nation.

Today, the Munsee mostly live in Ontario, Wisconsin, and Kansas. After the arrival of the Europeans in the seventeenth century, the Munsee population of the Hudson Valley was decimated by smallpox and other diseases to which they possessed no natural immunity. Their lands were expropriated by Dutch and British colonists and colonial governments and many of them moved south and west to join other Lenape communities between the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. It was in this area where, in the 1730s, they were defrauded of their lands in the notorious land swindle known as the Walking Treaty, after which they were forced still further west towards the Ohio River.

I offer this acknowledgment of the people who fished, farmed, hunted, and traded all across the Lower Hudson Valley for more than 7,000 years. I acknowledge the history of dispossession through which they were removed from their homes and the ongoing violence of colonization, which continues to shape the lives of Indigenous peoples, including the living descendants of the Wolf Clan.

artist statement

My work is about obsessiveness and obsession, memory, identity, and longing.

I am astounded by the resiliency of the forest: the endless process of reproduction, mutation, and evolution. Even after we trample it, cut it all down, build from and over it, new seeds scatter, vines reach. My work explores the way nature reclaims the built environment. Who or what will fill the vacancies after we have passed through?

I’m drawn to former industrial buildings, abandoned gardens, and the kinds of interstitial spaces that might go unnoticed—under the stairs, odd corners or alleys, the roots, trunks, and crooks of trees. Neglected or decomposing spaces hold promise. My hand-cut artwork is a false nature. It’s the juxtaposition of artificial forest to forestscape.

I use both the negative and positive pieces of my hand-cut drawings—weaving the off-cuts into thickets or clusters, suspending the smallest pieces to mimic swarms or clouds.

An omen for the augur / that moment when starlings blackout the sun.